FEED: In your time at Ruwido, how has the way home audiences interact with media evolved?
REGINA BERNHAUPT: I haven’t been working at Ruwido very long, at least by Ruwido standards. I’ve only been there about 15 years – the average at the company is more than 30! We’re a traditional, long-standing company, but have been trying to understand the future of interaction, especially when it comes to the living room. Looking back is always easy. Looking forward is more complicated. To understand how media behaviour evolves, we at Ruwido use an expression – the ‘kernel’ of human behaviour – it’s something stable and doesn’t change much. This represents some basic needs and wants we experienced in the past. Our company is making products for controlling the living room. Everything has a form factor, so we might think of different remote controls or devices. But the deeper kernel is the idea that you want to control things remotely – and that doesn’t change. There’s a physical restraint people want to overcome, to interact with things that are far away. Then there’s a temporal aspect, wanting to enjoy something in the future or interact with another in the past, for example by recording content to watch later. Today, everything is instantaneous, but so much is going on at the same time that there’s a need to keep one in mind to watch later. We’re not very good at doing 25 things at once. “LOOKING BACK IS ALWAYS EASY. LOOKING FORWARD IS MORE COMPLICATED”
REGINA BERNHAUPT: We are investing a lot in trying to understand what values people have, and what long-term values people stick to when they make decisions. Decisions about installing things in the smart home, for example, or how they want to live, compared to how they want to work. These long-term values are important to look at in terms of how people change, and they’re crucial when it comes to new trends and fashions. They change slowly over the years. Understanding them helps us look into the future and think about the media landscape and smart home in terms of design. So we are not just chasing fashionable gadgets, but looking for the things that have long-term impact. FEED: What kind of research has been done on how audiences engage with content?
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